Want to watch all of The Sopranos in less than an hour? Well, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the show that helped to change television, those in decision-making positions thought that the right thing to do was do episode recaps that were 25 seconds long. Sure!
Look, the Italianness in me is going to intensify as I talk about The Sopranos, but it is a show that I watched with my family like it was our church. So, to see it “celebrated” by having every episode reduced down to 25-second recaps doesn’t exactly make me feel happy. The recaps don’t even include “Woke Up This Morning” by Alabama 3! How will the people know that the theme song for the series slaps?
Will they get that Paulie and Christopher had the best relationship on the show? Are these things that the 25-second recaps will highlight? Because that’s what is important to me.
Now look, this isn’t a completely bad move, because it is exciting for someone like me, who watched the show when it aired and now want to remind myself everything that happened. But I am not the only one who is going to watch these, and there will be people who use these recaps as their way to say that they watched The Sopranos.
This anniversary celebration does include behind-the-scenes content, never-before-seen footage from the show, and more. So the good does balance out the bad of this idea, but it just makes me very worried about how people are going to take in a show like The Sopranos and whether or not it will make them go to watch the show as it was originally meant to be seen.
No one wants to watch television this way
I understand trying to get through something to be part of the conversation. There are times when I speed up my viewing by watching something at 1.5x speed or even 2.0x depending on whether I can understand what is being said. But that doesn’t mean that is a good way to go about life and art. The Sopranos changed television, helped put HBO on the map, and is still regarded as one of the best shows to ever have been made.
Reducing that to 25-second recaps of every episode so that someone can “binge” it in less than 40 minutes doesn’t feel like honoring its legacy. Again, maybe the thought process was to do this so that we could be reminded of the show’s brilliance and go back and rewatch it. But what we’re currently seeing is a lot of fans angry that the show is now just on TikTok for anyone’s viewing.
The behind-the-scenes footage and the never-before-seen things are exciting! We could have just gotten that content, and I think that fans of The Sopranos would have been very excited. Or maybe just do an entire season recap if that is more your speed, so people can still go rewatch (or watch for the first time) the show as a whole.
Hopefully this move inspires people to go and watch The Sopranos. If not, there will certainly be a lot of people who have watched all 86 episodes in less than an hour.
(featured image: Max)
